How to Show Your Work

If a tree falls in the forest, did the tree fall? This is the same question as: “If I worked on a project and never showed it to anyone, did I work on the project?”.

The answer for the sake of moving your career forward is no, the project does not exist.

You must get in the habit of showing your work to your friends, family and other people who might be interested in it.

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the greatest makers of code in the 21st Century was known for supporting the idea of “Move Fast and Break Things”, by showing your work before its even ready.

So how do you go about showing your work? The first way is you have to document the project as you’re working on it. If it’s a visual piece, you will want to be taking photographs of it progressing.

If it’s a code project, you’ll want to take some screenshots as the app comes to life.

That way, when the project gets finished, you’ll be used to taking the steps necessary for documenting it.

Sure, the ‘in-progress’ documents might not be very useful later on, but it’s about ingraining a habit of showing your work.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to talk about how to put that work together in some sort of portfolio, and then we’ll finish the series of by talking about how we can show this to specific people.